Improving the software development process and software performance through the application of systems engineering principles including concurrency

Abstract

The ABC Company has been developing human resource administration software for over 10 years. Although this software is not overly technical and ABC has sufficient resources and tools for software development, one significant problem continues to be encountered.

The primary problem faced by ABC software is properly defining and fulfilling user expectations and requirements. This problem can be measured primarily through the growing number of change and maintenance requests from clients upon installation. Numerous hours are spent in these maintenance activities which result in budget overruns and lower profits (or losses).

The purpose of this project was to develop recommendations for alleviating the problem as described above. A study of the problem and possible approaches resulted in the hypothesis that a re-engineering of ABC's software development process to more rigorously follow a systems engineering process, including concurrent engineering (CE) techniques, would help alleviate the problem.

The project methodology was implemented on two software development efforts -- one using ABC's current development approach and the other utilizing a systems engineering approach with CE principles. A systems engineering evaluation tool, the objectives matrix, was used to measure each projects' performance in order to test the hypothesis.